The epistemic side of retrospective utterances

The paper further contributes to what Schegloff (2007) terms as “retro-sequences”. Different utterance formats such as utterances expansions by a second speaker, or questions regarding prior utterances, can be termed retrospective in a communicative sense. While previous research describes both utterance formats as syntactic and communicative opposites, this paper concentrates on their common ground, e.g. their common sequence organization. The paper demonstrates how interlocutors use the different utterance formats to display a degree of understanding with varying epistemic stance, and specifies the linguistic means for it.